In this topic, I am providing a categorized directory of all relevant Communication from Blizzard Entertainment regarding Overwatch. This includes all relevant forum posts from the Overwatch Development Team, community managers, and customer service representatives from both the new forums and the old forums. This also includes any relevant Reddit posts, Developer Update Videos, News Articles, Technical Support Articles, Third-Party Interviews, etc. Basically, anything that is not in an organized place. Please note, Patch Notes are not included.

If you are interested in specifically a history of hero balance changes, please check out the guide by Kristal here:

I wanna put a log of every single balance change ever put into the live version of the game. Lemme know if I missed anything(I’m not gonna include bug fixes so Moira not healing through barriers and Roadhog’s right click having falloff won’t be listed.)
General1.1.0.2
Self-healing abilities now charge ultimate abilities. As a result, some heroes’ ultimate costs have been adjusted.
1.3.0.2
Ultimates that consume the ultimate meter when activated will now drain the meter more quickly (.25 se…

If you are looking for a comprehensive guide to the rules and functions to Competitive Play, please check out the guide by Kaawumba here:

The rating and matchmaking system is confusing, and a good overview does not appear to be available. The official overview (1, 48) is incomplete and does not answer a number of common player questions and concerns. This information below is gathered from sporadic blue posts and developer update videos, and salted with my own experience and experiments, various forum threads, and watching streams. Note that since Blizzard does not give exact algorithms, I do have to fill in some gaps, or leave so…

Any posts that hint or preview features or changes to the game that have now been applied in the current patch of the game. For example in 2016 and 2017, Reporting on Console was a heavily requested feature. Since that feature is now in the game, any mentions of that post are no longer included in this archive.

Any posts that don’t specifically discuss the reasoning of any hero balance changes that have already been applied. (i.e. “Yes, we have plans for Mercy” coming soon.) However, posts that give specific reasoning to hero balance changes will be archived. (i.e. “We have no plans to revert Mercy. We are very satistified with the changes.”)

Most Blizzard Posts regarding the game’s development in Beta, unless it is historically relevant. I don’t have direct access to the beta forums which have been shut down for years now, not to mention most posts in the Beta are irrelevant to the state of the game today.

How to navigate this guide
To keep things simple, click on the expand header to open that category to view that list of posts. Posts are organized by subject, post author, date, and source. A emoji indicates a post that is no longer available to be replied to. A emoji indicates a post that may be longer relevant to the current state of the game. A emoji indicates a post that contains highly relevant information and is a recommended read for all members of the community. A emoji indicates a post that contains information that is temporarily relevant and will likely be removed from the archives at a later date. A emoji indicates a post that may lead to “dangerous” content, the post is to denote the warning from Blizzard about such content, but be sure to not navigate to the source content in order to protect your accounts.

Why this guide was made
I like maintaining a record of all relevant responses from Blizzard in order to answer questions to other players on these forums. This is not an initiative for me as a forum MVP, but as a player who really loves this game. I hope that by sharing this organized database, players will be able to look into past developer responses to be able to cite from when creating constructive content here on the forums. Please let me know in the comments below if I missed any relevant content (be sure to provide a link), or if I just screwed something up (I am sure I mislinked something at least once).

DIRECTORY (Note each category is in its own page due to character limit per post).

After reviewing the first section, I overhauled the Competitive, General Features, and Report/Actions sections to have more defined sub sections. Now you should be able to look up specific subjects in the headers for easy research.

I suppose this goes to show that the community cares more about the game than the creators.

The community cares and so does Blizzard. Right now, it seems so frustrating with a lack of communication from any of the development team lately, but do remember that it is BlizzCon season. The forums was just as quiet this time last year. I know they are working on making the game even better. I have a feeling our patience will be rewarded within a matter of days.

Edit - I noticed nothing showed up on the list for animation cancels. Even if Widowmaker’s scope trick wasn’t an animation cancel, the corresponding post goes over some of their opinions on responsive hero design…

Edit - I noticed nothing showed up on the list for animation cancels. Even if Widowmaker’s scope trick wasn’t an animation cancel, the corresponding post goes over some of their opinions on responsive hero design…

Added. I think I was getting tired by the time I was sort through the Geoff Goodman posts. Not to mention since a high majority of the posts are short responses of balance changes that are now out of date from the release of the latest patch, I often did not include them. However this one is worthy because of the design principal he discusses. Thanks for pointing it out.

brokenstyli:

Edit 2 - Any chance this can be broken up into Seasons? I know that’s a bit more formatting, but it does help make it more easily digestible since people associate certain things with certain seasons.

Competitive Season or Calendar Seasons? Not quite sure what you mean. If changes reflected a certain Competitive Season it was marked. Otherwise any subject point should technically apply today unless it has an hourglass emoji attached to it.

Thanks to everyone who has liked my topic so far, it means a lot to see this has been well received. If you ever feel like you are ever going to use this resource, remember to hit the blue bookmark icon in the starting post. That way you can find the topic in your bookmarks on your forum profile.